Jonathan at his birthday celebration- we forgot to take one
of the meal with everyone but it was a lovely time of games, chatting
tea and a quiet sunday afternoon. Thanks guys!
Yes, I know, as a pair of Doctoral students in Music history, one a classically-trained pianist and the other an organist, it may be shocking to learn that we enjoy praise and worship music. Click the link below before reading on...
I'll bet you didn't expect to see the Kiev Symphony Orchestra and Chorus.
As much as I would like to launch into a 3,000-word diatribe on music in the church, let me just say this:
I am on a mission to reclaim the phrase "praise and worship music." If you're looking for a really good praise and worship chorus, for instance, try the chorus of any chorale-concertato cantata by Mr. Bach, like Christ lag in Todesbanden, BWV 4, for Easter.
And I am also on a mission to expunge the phrase "worship style" from our common parlance. There is no such thing as a worship style. There is true worship and there is false worship. Consider these words from Carl Schalk, in his book Music in Early Lutheranism: Shaping the Tradition (1524-1672). And let's be clear. This is not an esoteric scholarly work for heartless brainiacs. This is a book about Lutheran Christians working out their salvation with fear and trembling.
"To call for a fresh look at the theological ideas which motivated these early Lutheran composers and which served as an inspiration to their craft of composition need not be viewed, as some might have it, as a simple, naive repristination of archaic ideas. Nor need the attempt to recover much of this music for worship today be seen simply as an anachronistic, backward-looking romanticism. Rather, to examine more closely the music of early Lutheran composers may well be the first step to approaching more realistically and faithfully the problems and questions which continue to vex the musical and liturgical life of today's church." (emphasis added)
